TidBITS#1134/16-Jul-2012
========================
Issue link:
While we all wait for Apple to release Mountain Lion, we have a slew
of practical articles for you this week. Adam Engst explains how you
can control your Apple TV with the same remote you use for your TV,
and how to make sure you’re getting the bandwidth from your ISP that
you’re paying for. Also, Agen Schmitz delves into the dark world of
MPAA ratings and iTunes metadata to figure out how to apply them to
videos he would prefer his five-year-old didn’t run across on the
iPad. Plus, Adam covers the story about how Dropbox’s Public folder
will be going away (but can be re-enabled) for new accounts, and we’re
looking to find out which day of the week would be best for our
upcoming TidBITS Presents: “Upgrading to and Using Mountain Lion.”
Notable software releases this week include Microsoft Office for Mac
2011 14.2.3, iPhoto ’11 9.3.1, and Audio Hijack Pro 2.10.4.
Articles
TidBITS Presents “Upgrading to and Using Mountain Lion”
Dropbox Public Folder Leaves and Returns
Control Your Apple TV with Another Remote
Are You Getting the Bandwidth You’re Paying For?
Hunting the Elusive MPAA Rating Field in iTunes
TidBITS Watchlist: Notable Software Updates for 16 July 2012
ExtraBITS for 16 July 2012
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TidBITS Presents “Upgrading to and Using Mountain Lion”
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by Adam C. Engst: , @adamengst
article link:
We’re planning our next big TidBITS Presents event, but this one
is going to be a bit different from the previous one (see “Watch
Joe Kissell and Adam Engst in TidBITS Presents: Adieu MobileMe,”
16 June 2012). Most notably, it won’t be about MobileMe’s final
days, but about the hottest thing slated to come from Apple this
month: OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion! And while Joe Kissell will once
again be presenting, he’ll be joined by Matt Neuburg. Joe will
talk about issues related to upgrading to Mountain Lion, based on
his “Take Control of Upgrading to Mountain Lion,” and Matt will
demonstrate some of Mountain Lion’s new features that he’s been
writing about in “Take Control of Using Mountain Lion.”
Everyone will be able to watch this TidBITS Presents after the fact,
but to thank them for their financial support, we’re restricting
participation in the live event to TidBITS members and to those who
have purchased either of our Mountain Lion ebooks. For people who
fall into one of those categories, we’ll be in touch via email
when we have final details, such as the date and time of the event.
In the meantime, though, we’d appreciate it if you could help us
figure out which days are best for you to participate in TidBITS
Presents events so we can take that into account when scheduling
this and future ones. At the moment, we anticipate that
presentations will be 60–90 minutes long at the most, and will
typically take place in the middle of the day, Eastern time, to
accommodate as many time zones as possible. Please vote on the
TidBITS Presents page. Thanks!
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Dropbox Public Folder Leaves and Returns
----------------------------------------
by Adam C. Engst: , @adamengst
article link:
4 comments
One notable feature of the Dropbox file-sharing service is the
Public folder. Put any file or folder in that folder, Control-click
the item, and choose Dropbox > Copy Public Link to get a download
URL for it, while not exposing any other items in the Public folder
or having to set up explicit sharing. When clicked, the file loads
in the user’s Web browser, which means, for everything other than
the file types that Web browsers display internally (HTML, JPEG,
GIF, often PDF), that the file downloads immediately.
It’s a great way to let someone — or better yet, an arbitrary
group — download a file without sending it in email or fussing
with a specialized service like YouSendIt. (Such services have their
place, since they offer additional features such as time-limited
downloads, password protection, and so on. But they’re often
overkill, and Dropbox is super easy.)
You can even use Dropbox’s Public folder as a way of publishing a
simple Web site; just put all your site files in a folder, copy that
folder to the Public folder, and use the same technique to get the
URL to the index.html file of the site. As long as your site uses
relative links for internal navigation, everything will just work.
A few months ago, however, Dropbox made it possible to share any
file or folder from any place in the Dropbox hierarchy in much the
same way. Control-click the item and choose Dropbox > Get Link. This
nominally does the same thing — enables you to share a single file
or folder via a URL without sharing the enclosing folder with that
person. But there’s a difference. This new method always takes you
to a Web page on the Dropbox Web site, displaying the content if the
browser can do so. But if it can’t display the content, instead of
downloading the file as happens with files in the Public folder,
Dropbox displays a custom Web page that lets the user download the
file or add it to their own Dropbox. And as a result, you can’t
publish a simple Web site that way.
You might think that these two features sound quite similar, and
that’s where our story starts, about a month ago, when word
appeared on the Dropbox forums that Dropbox would be eliminating the
Public folder from new accounts. Current accounts would retain the
Public folder, Dropbox said, but the company claimed that many users
were confused by the Public folder and shared files offering
essentially the same functionality.
This announcement provoked a storm of protest — and even a “Save
the Public Folder” petition that garnered over 900 signatures —
since even if only a small percentage of Dropbox users rely on the
Public folder, some of those who do have use cases that require
direct file access rather than an intermediate Web page. Plus, some
developers had built software that assumes the presence of a Public
folder.
About a week after the initial announcement, Dropbox pulled back,
with another forum post saying that new users wouldn’t have the
Public folder enabled by default, but that there would be a way for
them to get one. That post also said that developers should still
avoid relying on the Public folder, since not every Dropbox user
would necessarily have one, and that the company wants to provide
equivalent functionality through the API where possible. It’s not
quite clear if that is true at the moment, but progress is being
made.
It’s easy to see this as a tempest in a teapot, but there’s no
way for us to know if the public outcry was key for the company
making the Public folder an option for new users and extending the
Dropbox API for developers. It’s entirely possible that Dropbox
simply underestimated the desire for the Public folder and some of
its associated features, and the hue and cry from users and
developers alike caused the change in policy. If so, there’s no
reason to assume negative intentions anywhere — Dropbox removed
the feature to make the product easier for new users, and after
hearing customer feedback, reinstated it for those who want it and
extended the API to compensate further.
The moral of the story would seem to be that all’s well that ends
well, and if you’re helping a new user set up Dropbox in the
future, you may need to poke around in the settings to enable the
Public folder.
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Control Your Apple TV with Another Remote
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by Adam C. Engst: , @adamengst
article link:
I’m relatively new to everyday use of the second-generation Apple
TV, since we just got one, along with a modern TV, for Christmas
last year. Before that our video viewing was almost exclusively via
Netflix, first on an elderly 15-inch MacBook Pro and then on an iPad
when the MacBook Pro started freezing during video playback. The TV
we settled on, a 50-inch Panasonic Viera ST30, has its own fully
functional Netflix client built into its Viera Connect smart TV
platform, and if it wasn’t in my interest to know what Apple is up
to with the Apple TV, I would have no problem relying solely on the
Viera Connect Netflix client.
But the Apple TV’s Netflix implementation is prettier, and just a
touch easier in everyday use; it was also easier to set up, but
that’s a one-time task that wasn’t hard on either. We tend to
work our way through TV shows (currently enjoying “Star Trek:
Enterprise” with Tristan), so we use Netflix’s Recently Watched
collection a lot. The Viera client requires seven button presses to
get there, whereas the Apple TV requires only three; if you’re
more of a movie fan, the Viera client requires only four button
presses to get to your Instant Queue, whereas the Apple TV requires
nine. Slightly annoyingly, those button presses with the Apple TV
always require the Viera’s remote as well, since only it can turn
the TV on.
That got me wondering if the Viera remote could be used to run the
Apple TV. The Viera remote is a traditional black plastic bar with a
ton of buttons, most of which I’ve never used or even figured out
what they do. It’s not nearly as elegant as Apple’s sleek
aluminum remote, but it has a very similar four-way controller with
a central OK button and a separate Return button that does the same
thing as Apple’s Menu button.
In fact, Apple did have the foresight to enable any remote to
control the Apple TV, as documented in this support article. The
process is the reverse of the way programmable remotes work, in that
the Apple TV itself learns to associate buttons you press on the
other remote with actions on the Apple TV. It’s a simple process,
which you work through on the Apple TV in Settings > Remotes > Learn
Remote. Basically, all you do is follow along as the Apple TV asks
you to press a button on your other remote that corresponds with the
Up action on the Apple TV, followed by Down, Left, Right, and so on.
It takes just a minute or two to complete, and worked nearly
perfectly.
I say “nearly perfectly” because there’s one trick on the
Apple TV that seems to work only with Apple’s aluminum remote. You
can put your Apple TV to sleep by pressing and holding the center
Select button for a few seconds; this saves a bit of power and cuts
down on network usage if you have a photo screensaver bringing
photos in from a linked computer. When I press and hold the
equivalent OK button on the Viera remote, the Apple TV goes to
sleep, but wakes up again nearly instantly. However, it’s easy to
set Settings > General > Sleep After to 15 minutes in the Apple TV,
which will eliminate most unnecessary power and bandwidth usage too.
What I don’t know, and can’t really advise on, is if other TV
and universal remotes will work equally as well with the Apple TV.
With the exception of the Skip Back and Skip Ahead actions in the
Apple TV (which we’ve seldom used), the Viera remote has keys that
match every Apple TV action, so it’s a particularly good fit. If
your remote lacks a four-way controller, you could use the 2-4-6-8
keys on the numeric keypad to simulate it, for instance, with 7
mimicking the Menu button and 5 acting as the Select button.
(In case you’re wondering, both Apple and Panasonic have iOS apps.
Apple’s Remote app runs the Apple TV, but I find it awkward to
haul my iPhone out of my pocket, find the app, connect to the Apple
TV, and use it. Except, that is, if I need to type any text on the
Apple TV, where the Remote app’s virtual keyboard is far easier
than the hunt-and-press approach necessary with any physical remote.
Panasonic’s Wi-Fi-based Viera app can’t turn the TV on, not
surprisingly, nor can it enter the Viera Connect interface, but once
you’re in Viera Connect, the app does work and could be useful for
entering text, which is again the only thing it does notably better
than the dedicated remote.)
In the end, there’s nothing horribly wrong with using both
remotes, or even supplementing them with the iOS apps — they all
work well enough. But I’m enough of an interface connoisseur that
I appreciate reducing the number of interface actions to the
absolute minimum whether I’m using my Mac or my TV, and being able
to use only a single remote scratches that itch. If you’re like
me, it’s worth a few minutes to try; you can always delete the
learned remote from the Apple TV’s list of remotes if you don’t
like it.
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Are You Getting the Bandwidth You’re Paying For?
------------------------------------------------
by Adam C. Engst: , @adamengst
article link:
11 comments
Not long ago, I was invited to participate in a post-session Google
Hangout On Air at the Le Web conference in London. When the
organizer asked me to report on my bandwidth, though, there was much
head-shaking as to whether my roughly 1 Mbps upstream bandwidth
would be sufficient to provide high-quality video (my 15 to 20 Mbps
downstream bandwidth wasn’t a problem). After a couple of brief
Internet outages several weeks before this, Time Warner had replaced
both my cable modem and the entire cable from the street, so I was
pretty certain all the hardware was working within spec.
I hadn’t revisited Time Warner Cable’s service offerings in
years, but some quick research online showed that I had the Turbo
Internet plan, which promises up to 20 Mbps downstream and up to 2
Mbps upstream. Ignoring the fact that I wasn’t ever seeing the 2
Mbps upstream I should have been getting, I decided that an extra
$20 per month to upgrade to the Extreme Internet plan (30/5 Mbps)
was worthwhile, since we upload a fair amount of data and the 5 Mbps
of upstream bandwidth would be welcome for video conferencing in
particular. But since downstream bandwidth has never been our
problem, the Ultimate Internet plan (50/5 Mbps) didn’t seem worth
the extra cost. Time Warner made it easy to click a link to chat
with an online customer service rep, who was only too happy to help
me upgrade. While we were chatting, I explicitly asked if my current
cable modem — which had just been replaced, remember — would be
sufficient for the Extreme Internet service level, and I was assured
it would be. Some 20 minutes later, everything was done, and I was
told that I’d start seeing improved performance either
immediately, or within 2 to 4 hours.
(In fact, what happened was that 2 hours later, the entire
connection went down, and I had to call support and get them to do
something. It’s always a little unclear what they do, although I
believe it involved properly linking my cable modem to the updated
account. Luckily, they managed to fix it just as my iPhone dropped
the call because I was in a low-reception part of the house.)
When I started testing the performance again, Speedtest.net reported
consistently that I was getting between 20 and 30 Mbps downstream,
and while my upstream performance wasn’t 5 Mbps, it was regularly
between 1.5 and 2.5 Mbps. Bandwidth is very often shared, so it’s
entirely common to get a bit less than your promised bandwidth, and
while 2.5 Mbps was less than the 5 Mbps I’d been promised with the
Extreme Internet plan, it was good enough for the Le Web conference
hangout (with Kevin Rose of Google, if you want to watch). But as
the days went by afterwards, that 2.5 Mbps upstream maximum nagged
at me, and when some ebook uploads were taking way too long,
Speedtest.net reported I was seeing only about 800 Kbps upstream.
Frustrated, I called Time Warner once again, the support rep agreed
that I should be seeing better performance, and he dispatched a tech
to my house. As with the first tech who had replaced my cable, the
second tech was extremely amiable and knowledgeable, but he had some
choice words for the online customer service rep who had upgraded my
account. Apparently — and this is so common that the techs have a
word for it: “office-only’d” — the change had been made only
in the office, and there was no way my cable modem could support 5
Mbps upstream bandwidth. Making this even more obvious was the fact
that the Extreme Internet plan includes wireless clients — the
cable modem also acts as a wireless gateway — and the cable modem
I had didn’t have any wireless capabilities at all (I didn’t
notice this discrepancy when ordering, since I was focused on the
bandwidth and had no desire to replace my AirPort Extreme).
After trying two cable modems that he’d been told were new (the
first had a locked wireless network named “We no speak
Americano” configured on it, and the second didn’t advertise any
wireless network or allow wired connections), he grew irritated and
gave me one straight from a shrink-wrapped box. It worked properly
and provided the full 30 Mbps downstream and 5 Mbps upstream, as you
can see in my graphs below, which also show the improvements over
time.
(Or, rather, it worked for about 2 hours, at which point the entire
connection went down again, and I had to work my way through three
levels of Time Warner phone support before I got to a guy who was
able to link my fancy new cable modem to my account properly and get
it all to work again. It seems clear that the Time Warner system has
some disconnects between what happens in the office and what happens
in the field.)
So the moral of this story is that it’s absolutely worth using
Speedtest.net (or a similar service) to check your downstream and
upstream bandwidth. Performance does vary throughout the day, so be
sure to run multiple tests in Speedtest.net over a number of days
and at different times of day. Also be sure to test from a computer —
although I like the Speedtest.net Mobile Speed Test app for
testing general connectivity, its download numbers are often way too
low and its upload numbers are often a bit high. Speedtest.net will
keep track of your results (as you can see in the screenshots
above), assuming you keep the same IP address, or you can set up an
account to ensure that your tests are collected regardless.
Once you have a pretty good sense of your average downstream and
upstream bandwidth, compare that against what your Internet service
provider promises you. Based on my experience, here’s what I’d
advise:
* Internet plans are a bit like phone plans — they’re always
changing, and there are often limited-time signup discounts — so
what you signed up for a few years ago (or more) may not be the best
plan that’s available to you now.
* If you decide to change plans, I recommend calling rather than using
online chat, if that’s available. Online chat is fine for
determining service levels and asking questions (and it eliminates
issues with heavy accents from offshore phone banks), but I think
it’s better to have quick interaction with someone while actually
making changes.
* While you’re talking to the rep, make absolutely certain that your
cable or DSL modem will be able to handle the new service level. Be
insistent on this point, and make sure that the rep understands how
long you’ve had your current hardware if it’s old. Modems are
generally identified by their unique MAC addresses, but there might
be several such numbers on your device, so it’s worth taking
pictures of all the appropriate labels ahead of time so you can read
out numbers easily if requested.
* If a tech comes to your home or office to troubleshoot problems,
stick with them while they’re working and tell them whatever you
can think of that might help. For instance, my house was wired with
coaxial cable in the walls, and while we originally had to use it,
the first tech found that it was adding interference. Relocating the
cable modem to avoid the internal wiring helped with upstream
bandwidth. Also ask them to check your cable’s connectors, since
corrosion there can cause loss of signal.
* Don’t let the tech leave until you have tested the connection with
Speedtest.net and can prove to your satisfaction that you’re
getting the promised bandwidth. Although I had two good techs, the
second one grumbled that there were a number of others in the
organization who did shoddy work and ended up having to be bailed
out later.
* If trenching is necessary, be certain to talk with the crew doing
the work and tell them if you know where any underground wires are
located. And, regardless, ask them to try to locate whatever
electric, phone, invisible fence, or other wires might be buried in
the trenching area, since trenching machines can slice right through
existing cable with little or no indication (speaking from hard-won
experience here). Personally, I plan to photograph the area and mark
up the photos for future reference, now that we know what wires go
where.
* Lastly, whenever you talk with anyone from the Internet service
provider, make sure to write down a case number or get contact
information, so it’s easier to get back into the support queue
should you need additional help. In my case, both the service level
upgrade and the second cable modem swap required phone follow-ups to
bring the connection back online, so be aware that such efforts
might be necessary.
I certainly wasn’t expecting my Internet connection — which is
generally quite reliable — to require so many phone calls and
truck rolls to my house, but I’m glad I stuck with it in the end,
since I appreciate actually getting the full bandwidth that I’ve
been promised. It’s easy to imagine someone who’s not
particularly network-savvy suffering with a lousy Internet
connection, just because they don’t realize what they should be
getting.
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Hunting the Elusive MPAA Rating Field in iTunes
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by Agen G. N. Schmitz:
article link:
I recently had a lightbulb moment in regards to the family iPad that
we let our five-year-old son use for video entertainment around our
home. Rather than having to remember to manually sync his current
slate of favorite videos to the iPad, I would use the Home Sharing
capabilities of the iPad’s Videos app to tap into our complete
library of movies and TV shows. This would save me time, prevent
heartbreak from our son upon realizing that Dad forgot to sync a
cherished title, and free up space on our video-bloated iPad.
First, I ensured that appropriate parental controls were set on the
iPad for restricting accessible movies and TV shows to just those
with family-friendly ratings (found in Settings > General >
Restrictions). Then, after turning on Home Sharing for videos
(Settings > Video), I opened the Videos app, tapped the newly
displayed Shared pane button at the top, selected our home’s
master iTunes library... and was met by Louis C.K. Not exactly the
family-friendly fare I was envisioning.
I could tell the iOS restrictions were working because several
movies that we’d purchased from the iTunes Store with MPAA ratings
stronger than G no longer appeared in the list, such as “Star
Trek” (PG-13) and “Hot Fuzz” (R). (The MPAA rating, as
bestowed upon films by the Motion Picture Association of America, is
the industry standard to advise content suitability, and what
you’ll see on just about every movie you see in the theater or
purchase through the iTunes Store).
However, movies that I had encoded myself from our DVD collection or
purchased from other sources in an iTunes-compatible format (such as
Louis C.K.’s “Live at the Beacon Theater”) were there for the
watching by anyone — even with the most restrictive restrictions
in place. Similarly, TV show episodes that I had encoded on my own
and that didn’t include TV Parental Guidelines ratings (like the
original BBC version of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the
Galaxy”) were also displayed for viewing.
The easy solution to this would be to go into iTunes and modify the
errant video files by entering the appropriate MPAA rating for movie
files or TV Parental Guidelines ratings for TV show episodes.
However, I was gobsmacked to discover (after hunting high and low
through the Get Info metadata fields) that there’s no way to edit
parental control ratings within iTunes. (There is a Ratings field,
but this is used for assigning one to five stars to a video or music
file to denote favorites in your library.)
In fact, the only way to determine if a video file in iTunes has
been accorded a parental control rating is to view the Summary pane
in the Get Info window (where the rating appears at the bottom of
the left column of data), or to scan your videos using either the
List or Album List views, where the rating is displayed to the right
of the file’s name, still in the Name column. (If you’re in
another view, such as Grid or Cover Flow, press Command-Option-3 to
switch to List view or Command-Option-4 to switch to Album List
view.)
I did a bit of research and found a few options in the Mac App Store
that could do both encoding and metadata tagging in videos, such as
iFlicks and Magic Media Marker. But because I prefer to do my video
encoding with Handbrake, I settled on the well-regarded iDentify 2
shareware app from Justin Pulsipher, as its sole purpose was tagging
and I could try it for free before plunking down any cash. (While
you can use the main tagging features of iDentify for free, a $9.95
donation adds a few features such as automatic file renaming and
auto processing.)
While lightweight in size (it’s just 1.1 MB), iDentify is a
powerful tool for managing video file metadata — but it’s
restricted to just video files. If you’re interested in managing
the metadata tagging in your music library, you’ll need a separate
app such as Tagalicious or TuneUp. Oddly, I couldn’t find any apps
that can swing both ways for video and music metadata editing.
If you’re using iDentify to add metadata to video files you’ve
just encoded, I recommend using its default automatic lookup
setting, which pulls tag data from three sources: The Movie DB for
movies, The TVDB for TV shows, and tagChimp as a fallback. After a
lookup is performed, all metadata — from title and description to
genre and artwork and, yes, parental control rating — are
automagically filled in. You can then adjust fields to suit your
needs or add more data that was missed in the automatic lookup. When
finished, click the Done Editing button to return to the file list
view, then click Save to set the metadata in the file. You can
choose to add the file automatically to your iTunes library in
iDentify’s preferences, or leave it unchecked to save that manual
task for later.
iDentify does a good job of looking up metadata for movie files as
long as the name of the file is close to the title of the movie.
However, for some titles that have multiple versions (such as
“Robin Hood”), you can add the correct title’s identifier from
the IMDB Web site (just copy the portion of the URL that starts with
“tt”, such as “tt0070608” for the Disney version of “Robin
Hood”). For TV shows, it’s best to title encoded files with the
season and episode numbers formatted as “S01E01” (denoting
season one, episode one) to get the best lookup returns from
iDentify.
If you’re working on files that have already been added to your
iTunes library, I recommend turning off the automatic lookup
function (found in iDentify’s Lookup preferences under the General
pane) as well as deselecting lookups for existing tags and artwork.
This enables you to manually modify just the metadata that needs
attention — such as parental control rating — without changing
the carefully calibrated tags and artwork you’ve already put in
place.
iDentify also enables you to open and edit multiple files. Add files
by dragging them to the file list view from the Finder, or by
clicking the Add File(s) button, Shift- or Command-selecting a set
of files, and then clicking the Edit Tags button. Modify the
metadata fields to taste, and save by pressing Command-S, or by
returning to the file list view and clicking the Save File(s)
button.
For my little project, I turned off the automatic lookup functions
before opening the movie and TV show files I already had in my
iTunes library, and then proceeded to apply my desired parental
control ratings to the files either individually or in groups. Back
on the iPad, I re-opened our main iTunes library from the Shared
pane in the Videos app and found that the offending videos had
indeed been correctly swept away by my selected iOS Restrictions
settings.
iDentify isn’t perfect. I wish it could show more information in
its file list view, and pressing Command-S suddenly closes you out
of the file you’re working on (making you wonder if the work you
put into editing your metadata was actually saved). But it’s a
fairly easy way to get the correct metadata into new files you’ve
encoded from your DVD library before adding them to your iTunes
library, as well as bulk editing metadata for files already in your
iTunes library. And, if you’re looking to make sure that your kids
are safe from your Louis C.K. collection, it’s essential for
adding MPAA and TV Parental Guideline ratings to ensure that your
parental controls work as you want them to.
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TidBITS Watchlist: Notable Software Updates for 16 July 2012
------------------------------------------------------------
by TidBITS Staff:
article link:
**Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 14.2.3** -- Offering a number of
improvements and fixes, Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 14.2.3 more
importantly resolves a security vulnerability with folder
permissions in certain Office for Mac 2011 14.2 versions, which
could enable an attacker to run a malicious executable and take
control of your Mac. Apart from the beefed-up security, the release
also improves stability in Excel when dragging to move a PivotTable
row or column, improves Full Screen View integration with Word, and
fixes an issue with some SkyDrive folders displaying as zero-byte
files. The update also addresses several IMAP issues in Outlook,
resolving a problem where some configurations repeatedly displayed
“Cannot create mailbox” errors, fixing duplication of email
messages when connecting to Gmail using IMAP, and adding a setting
to control the polling interval used with IMAP servers to avoid
intermittent “Too many simultaneous connections” errors. (Free
update through the Microsoft Web site or Microsoft AutoUpdate,
110 MB, release notes)
Read/post comments about Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 14.2.3.
**iPhoto ’11 9.3.1** -- While MobileMe is officially gone, Apple
continues to deal with its remnants with the release of iPhoto ’11
9.3.1. The update fixes a problem with MobileMe Gallery album
migration that caused photos to be moved from their original events
to a new event titled “From MobileMe.” It also fixes a rare bug
that caused iPhoto to hang when upgrading libraries. Remember that
starting with version 9.3, iPhoto now requires Mac OS X 10.7.4 or
later. ($14.99 new from the Mac App Store, free update through
Software Update or the Mac App Store, 630.4 MB via Software Update
or 599.65 MB via Apple’s support page)
Read/post comments about iPhoto ’11 9.3.1.
**Audio Hijack Pro 2.10.4** -- Offering preliminary support for OS X
10.8 Mountain Lion, Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack Pro gets bumped up
to version 2.10.4 with an updated Instant On component (now version
6) that improves overall system audio capture. In fact, the Instant
On component is now required for capturing audio from Safari and
QuickTime Player when running Mountain Lion, as well as when
snagging audio from a Fluid app. ($32 new, free update, 5.2 MB,
release notes)
Read/post comments about Audio Hijack Pro 2.10.4.
ExtraBITS for 16 July 2012
--------------------------
by TidBITS Staff:
article link:
Two quick ExtraBITS for you this week: news of Apple withdrawing
from, and then immediately rejoining, the EPEAT program for
environmental stewardship; and the strange story of a Russian hacker
who figured out how to trick iOS into allowing free in-app
purchases.
**Hacker Exploits iOS Flaw for Free In-App Purchases** -- Over at
Macworld, Lex Friedman does an excellent job running down the
strange story of a Russian hacker who figured out how to trick iOS
such that users could make some in-app purchases for free. Apple
should be able to fix the problem, but it’s an interesting example
of the classic “man in the middle” attack because, in this case,
the man in the middle is the user, rather than some bad guy.
Read/post comments
**Apple Back in EPEAT with Vague Explanation** -- They’re out! No,
they’re back! A few days after pulling all of its products out of
the EPEAT program for environmental stewardship (which put into
question numerous government and institution purchases, since many
of those entities require EPEAT-labeled products), Apple returns to
the group’s list with a note from outgoing hardware chief Bob
Mansfield. An explanation of the departure and return were not
included.
Read/post comments
$$
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